Timber Farm Sheds

Two timber sheds stand beneath a single large bare-limbed tree on the Deua River, near Braidwood in New South Wales. Their grey board walls have bowed over time and been patched with corrugated iron; a windowed lean-to extends from the nearer building, a curtained doorway faces the open ground, and two corrugated water tanks stand to the right. Leaf litter covers the lawn between the sheds and wherever the eye settles. The scene is ordinary in the way that only very old working structures can manage.

The huts were built from hand-split slab cut from timber standing on the property. Helena (Nellie) Davis had taken up freehold title to the land in 1910. The original huts were completed in 1927, and Nellie moved in with her son Everid and her daughter Neta. The floor plan and four elevations of the homestead were documented in a measured architectural drawing by Phil Rose in January 2008, recording the two huts as separate structures: one housing the kitchen, the other the sleeping quarters, both beneath the same tree.

The Davis family occupied Woolla continuously from 1927. Neta's son Vern was born there in 1928; her daughter Myrtle in 1930. Neta died at Woolla in 1990, the same year Vern was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and moved to a nursing home in Braidwood. Davis family ownership of the property ran from the 1910 freehold title until Vern's death in Braidwood in 2004, ninety-four years of unbroken family tenure.

The Deua River Track, the bridle and packhorse route running nearly fifty kilometres from the Araluen Creek confluence south to Bendethera, was the only means of access to Woolla until the 1960s. The buildings survived the 2019-2020 Black Summer bushfires, which swept the NSW south coast and prompted the evacuation of the entire region.

What this photograph records in 2021 is not a ruin. The sheds are kept, not restored. Emergency remediation has been done; ongoing maintenance continues. The walls hold. The tree holds. The water tanks stand where they always stood.